The Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act: H.R. 4174

Written testimony presented to the Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, United States House of Representatives

June 5, 2008

Introduction

Good morning Chairman Lampson, Ranking Member
Inglis and members of the Subcommittee. Thank
you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today on ocean
acidification and the proposed Federal Ocean Acidification Research and
Monitoring Act, H.R. 4174. My name is Scott Doney, and I am a Senior
Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole MA. My research focuses on interactions among
climate, the ocean and global carbon cycles, and marine ecosystems. I have
published more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and book
chapters on these and related subjects. I
serve on the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program (CCSP) Scientific Steering Group
and the U.S. Community Climate System Model (CCSM) Scientific Steering
Committee. Currently I am the chair of the U.S. Ocean Carbon and Climate Change
(OCCC) Scientific Steering Group and the U.S. Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry
(OCB) Scientific Steering Committee.

For today’s hearing, you have asked me to
discuss the
strengths and weaknesses of the current interagency effort to monitor and
research ocean acidification and to assess its potential impacts on marine
organisms and marine ecosystems, and in addition, to provide recommendations
for strengthening individual programs of the federal agencies participating in
the interagency committees focusing on ocean issues.

Current Scientific Understanding

My comments on our state of knowledge about
ocean acidification are based on a broad scientific consensus as represented in
the current scientific literature and recent in scientific assessments compiled
by the scientific community, in particular the United Kingdom Royal Society
(Royal Society, 2005), the German Advisory Council on Global Change
(WBGU) (Schuster et al., 2006), and a U.S.
science workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geological Survey (Kleypas
et al., 2006).

The current
rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, due to our intensive burning
of fossil fuels for energy, is fundamentally changing the chemistry of the sea,
pushing surface waters toward more acidic conditions. Greater acidity slows the
growth or even dissolves ocean plant and animal shells built from calcium
carbonate, the same mineral as in chalk and limestone. Acidification thus
threatens a wide-range of marine organisms, from microscopic plankton and
shellfish to massive coral reefs, as well as the food webs that depend upon
these shell-forming species. Rising CO2 levels will also alter a
host of other marine biological and geochemical processes, often in ways we do
not yet understand. Ocean acidification is a critical issue for the 21st
century impacting on the health of the ocean, the productivity of fisheries,
and the conservation and preservation of unique marine environments such as
coral reefs.

Over the last 250 years,
atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
increased by nearly 40%, from pre-industrial levels of about 280 ppmv (parts
per million volume) to nearly 384 ppmv in 2007 (Solomon et al. 2007). This rate
of increase, driven by human fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, is at
least an order of magnitude faster than has occurred for millions of years, and
the current concentration is higher than experienced on Earth for at least the
last 800,000 years and likely the last several tens of millions of years (Doney
and Schimel, 2007). About 1/3 of this excess, anthropogenic carbon dioxide
dissolves in the ocean, where it forms carbonic acid and a series of
dissociation products. The release of hydrogen ions from the breakdown of
carbonic acid lowers the pH of seawater, shifting the normally somewhat
alkaline seawater (surface pH about 8.2) toward more acidic conditions. As
important for many organisms is the simultaneous reduction in carbonate ion
concentration, which is used in the construction of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells.Ocean acidification is a predictable consequence of rising
atmospheric CO2and does not suffer from uncertainties
associated with climate change forecasts. Absorption of anthropogenic CO2, reduced pH, and lower calcium
carbonate saturation in surface waters, where the bulk of oceanic production
occurs, are well-verified from models, hydrographic surveys and time series
data (Feely et al 2004; Orr et al 2005).

Since
preindustrial times, the average ocean surface water pH has fallen by about 0.1
units, from about 8.21 to 8.10 (Royal Society, 2005), and is expected to decrease
a further 0.3-0.4 pH units (Orr et al., 2005) if atmospheric CO2concentrations reach 800 ppmv (the projected end-of-century
concentration according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
business as usual emission scenario; Solomon et al. 2007). The most sensitive
areas may be the subpolar North Pacific, the Southern Ocean, and along the
Pacific continental shelf and margin where waters are already near or at
corrosive levels for some carbonate shells (Feely et al., 2008). The problem of
ocean acidification will be with us for a long time because it takes centuries
to thousands of years for natural processes, primarily mixing into the deep-sea
and increased dissolution of marine carbonate sediments, to remove excess
carbon dioxide from the air.

Ocean
acidification appears to have a significant, and often negative impact on many
ocean plant and animal species. The magnitude and even the sign of the
biological effects, however, differ from organism group to group and on the
specific biological processes involved. Rising atmospheric CO2
alters seawater chemistry in several different ways---reducing pH, increasing
the partial pressure of dissolved CO2 gas (pCO2),
increasing total dissolved inorganic carbon, and reducing carbonate ion and the
saturation state of calcium carbonate minerals. Because of the reduction in
calcium carbonate saturation state, much of the research emphasis has been on
shell-forming plants and animals that use calcium carbonate including some
plankton (coccolithophorids, foramaniferia, and pteropods), benthic mollusks
(clams, oysters and mussels), echinoderms (sea urchins), corals and coralline
algae. Laboratory experiments show that ocean acidification and changes in
ocean carbonate chemistry directly harms many of these calcifying species by
reducing shell formation, slowing growth rates and hindering reproduction
(Fabry et al., 2008a). The degree of sensitivity varies among species, however,
and some organisms may show enhanced calcification at CO2levels projected to occur over the 21stcentury (Iglesias-Rodríguez et al., 2008). However,
calcification-CO2response studies exist for a limited
number of species in many calcifying groups, and currently, we lack sufficient
understanding of calcification mechanisms to explain species-specific
differences observed in manipulative experiments.

The consequences of
acidification will extend well beyond the fate of any particular marine
species. Acidification impacts on processes fundamental to the overall
structure and function of marine ecosystems. Any significant changes could have
far reaching impacts for the future of ocean food-webs. Many marine animals
prey on calcifying organisms or utilize their skeletons for habitat. Tropical
corals are the backdrop for rich and diverse reef environments, and many fish
species would disappear along with the corals. Others such as clams, scallops,
oysters and sea urchins are important sources of seafood. Less familiar are the
many shell-forming planktonic organisms, including plants like coccolithophores
and marine snails called pteropods, which are an important food source for
salmon and whales. Recent discoveries indicate the presence of extensive
deep-water coral reefs around the edge of continents and on seamounts, which
may decline before we fully understand their contribution as a habitat for
fish. Some preliminary experiments suggest that larval and juvenile fish may
also be at risk.

Human and Economic Dimensions of Ocean Acidification

Ocean
acidification will also impacts the millions of people that depend on its food
and other resources for their livelihoods. Fish and marine organisms provided,
on average, 15.5% of the world’s protein in 2003 (FAO, 2007); losses of
crustaceans, bivalves, their predators, and their habitat (in the case of
reef-associated fish communities) would particularly injure societies that
depend heavily on consumption, export, and tourism of marine resources. Reef
losses would also expose low-lying settlements and biologically diverse regions
to storm and wave damage, multiplying economic hardships (Anderson et al.,
2006).

U.S.
commercial fisheries depend on calcifying species and their predators, making
economic effects from ocean acidification a likelihood over the next several
decades. Acidification effects likely will be most directly felt on mollusk
fisheries (e.g., clams, scallops, oysters and mussels), which provide 18% of
total revenue (Figure 1, red tones).Crustaceans (e.g., lobsters, crabs, shrimp) may also be sensitive and
contribute an additional 32% of total revenue. The possible indirect impacts
through reduced food supply for commercial fish species is not well understood
yet. For scale, in 2006 the total landing value (what is paid for a boat’s
catch at the dock) of the U.S. commercial fisheries was about $4 billion, and
subsequent seafood processing, wholesale and retail activities added a net
$35.1 billion to the gross national product (Andrews et al. 2007). Domestic
commercial marine fisheries directly support a larger number of jobs in the
fishing fleet, the exact number not well reported because many fishers are
self-employed;wholesaling and seafood
processing generates an additional nearly 70,000 jobs nationwide; including
seafood retailing and food services expands that number substantially.
Meanwhile, U.S. recreational saltwater fishing generated $12 billion of direct,
indirect, and induced income (Steinback et al., 2004) and supported 350,000
jobs in 2004, many of them related to recreational boat sales and maintanence.

Scientific Knowledge Gaps and Future Research Directions

The U.S. research community has recently
hosted two major scientific meetings to identify knowledge gaps and discuss
future research needs in ocean acidification. The first meeting of 60 experts
in the field was held in 2005 in St. Petersburg FL and sponsored by National
Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS); the workshop developed a
consensus set of recommendations related to ocean acidification and calcifying
organisms (Kleypas et al., 2006). Building on that report, the U.S. Ocean
Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program (http://us-ocb.org/), supported NSF, NASA, and NOAA, hosted a planning workshop for 90 U.S.
and international ocean scientists in La Jolla, CA in the Fall of 2007. The
recommendations from the OCB workshop were similar to those of the St.
Petersburg meeting but extended as well more broadly to acidification impacts
on non-calcifying organisms and ocean biogeochemistry (Fabry et al., 2008b).

Major gaps exist in our
current scientific understanding, limiting our ability to forecast the
consequences of ocean acidification and hindering the development of adaptation
approaches for marine resource managers. Thus far, most of the elevated CO2response studies on marine biota, whether for calcification,
photosynthesis or some other physiological measure, have been short-term
laboratory or mesocosm experiments ranging in length from hours to weeks.
Chronic exposure to increased CO2may have complex effects on the growth
and reproductive success of calcareous and non-calcareous plants and animals
and could induce possible adaptations that are not observed in short term
experiments. Our present understanding also stems largely from experiments on
individual organisms or a species in isolation; consequently, the response of
populations and communities to more realistic gradual changes is largely
unknown.

Other aspects of ocean
biogeochemistry may be strongly influenced by rising CO2 levels.
Recent experiments with one of the most abundant types of phytoplankton, Synechococcus, showed significantly
elevated photosynthesis rates under warmer, high CO2 conditions.
Elevated CO2 also enhanced nitrogen fixation rates (production of
biologically useful nutrients from dissolved nitrogen gas) for a key tropical
marine cyanobacteria, which would in effect fertilize the surface ocean and
offset predicted reductions in tropical biological production due to climate
warming and stratification. Further, a major but underappreciated consequence
of ocean acidification will be broad alterations of inorganic and organic
seawater chemistry beyond the carbonate system. Acidification will affectthe biogeochemical dynamics of calcium
carbonate, organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in the ocean as well as the
seawater chemical speciation of trace metals, trace elements and dissolved
organic matter.

A
fully-integrated research program with in-water and remote sensing observing
systems on multiple-scales, laboratory, mesocosm (large volumes of seawater
either in tanks or plastic bags), and field process studies, and modeling
approaches is required to provide policymakers with informed management
strategies that address how humans might best mitigate or adapt to these
long-term changes. This program should emphasize how changes in the metabolic
processes at the cellular level will be manifested within the ecosystem or
community structure, and how they will influence future climate feedbacks. A
program should include the following components:

Systematic monitoring system with high resolution
measurements in time and space of atmospheric and surface water carbon
dioxide partial pressure (pCO2),
total dissolved inorganic carbon, alkalinity, and pH to validate model
predictions and provide the foundations for interpreting the impacts of
acidification on ecosystems;

In regions projected to undergo substantial changes
in carbonate chemistry, tracking of abundances and depth distributions of
key calcifying and non-calcifying species at appropriate temporal and
spatial scales to be able to detect possible shifts and distinguish
between natural variability and anthropogenic forced changes;

Standardized protocols and data reporting guidelines
for carbonate system perturbation and calcification experiments;

Manipulative laboratory experiments to quantify
physiological responses including calcification and dissolution,
photosynthesis, respiration, and other sensitive indices useful in
predicting CO2 tolerance of ecologically and economically
important species;

Manipulative mesocosm and field experiments to investigate
community and ecosystem responses (i.e., shifts in species composition,
food web structure, biogeochemical cycling and feedback mechanisms) to
elevated CO2and potential interactions with
nutrients, light and other environmental variables;

Integrated modeling approach to determine the likely
implications of ocean acidification processes on marine ecosystems and
fisheries including nested models of biogeochemical processes and higher
trophic-level responses to addressecosystem-wide dynamics such as competition, predation,
reproduction, migration, and spatial population structure;

Robust and cost effective methods for measuring pH,
pCO2, and
dissolved total alkalinity on moored buoys, ships of opportunity, and
research vessels, floats and gliders;

Studies on the human dimensions of ocean
acidification including the socio-economic impacts due to damaged
fisheries and coral reefs;

Current National Research Effort on Ocean Acidification

Over the last
several years, a growing U.S. research effort on ocean acidification has
emerged. The research is supported by several federal science agencies and
builds from two major oceanographic research programs one on ocean
biogeochemistry, the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS; http://www1.whoi.edu/), which ran from the late
1980s through the mid-2000s, and one of marine plankton ecology, U.S. Global
Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (GLOBEC; www.usglobec.org),
which is in it’s concluding synthesis phase. Each of the federal science agencies
involved brings a specific approach and research emphasis to the problem of
ocean acidification.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) supports observational networks for ocean CO2,
pH and seawater carbonate system through a combination research ship based
surveys (CLIVAR/CO2 Repeat Hydrography Program; ushydro.ucsd.edu)
and autonomous instruments on volunteer merchant vessels and moorings (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/ocd/gcc/index.php). NOAA also is involved in biological impact
assessment of acidification on corals and coral reefs and more recently fish
and invertebrates. Most of NOAA funding supports scientists internal to NOAA,
though there is some extramural funding of university researcher through the
Climate Program Office and Sea Grant.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports
unsolicited, hypothesis driven research on a wide range of relevant topics,
from ocean chemistry and physics to organism biology and genomics. NSF and NASA
jointly fund, along with NOAA, the CLIVAR/CO2 Repeat Hydrography
Program, which is directly documenting the decrease in ocean pH and changes in
seawater carbonate chemistry. NSF has also supported the two longest running,
continuous ocean carbon time-series, one off of Hawaii (http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/hot_jgofs.html) and the other off of Bermuda,
(http://bats.bios.edu). These sustained time-series were begun in 1988 under
the JGOFS program and are key elements in directly demonstrating acidification
trends. All NSF funding is extramural to the university academic community. As
the only non-mission science agency, NSF has built in flexibility to adapt
rapidly to new ideas as they arise from the research community and to fund
higher risk, discovery driven investigations.

The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration supports satellite and airborne remote sensing, ship-based
process studies and field validation and numerical modeling relevant to ocean
ecology and biogeochemistry. Much of the research is extramural and hypothesis
driven. Satellite ocean color data from NASA’s MODIS sensor and from
GeoEYE and NASA’s Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS) (http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/) have been used to
characterize the global distributions calcareous
plankton and coral reefs. NASA will also launch the Orbiting Carbon
Observatory (OCO; http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov) this December, a 2- year exploratory
mission to measure the vertical average atmospheric CO2 concentration;
this data can be combined with numerical models to estimate global patterns of
the exchange of carbon dioxide from the ocean and atmosphere. Much of the NASA funded ocean ecology and
biogeochemistry research is relevant to ocean acidification, and the funding
specifically focused on acidification it is expected to grow in the future.

The Department of Energy (DOE) does not have
an active ocean biogeochemical research program at the moment; in the past, it
has supported relevant work on measuring and modeling ocean CO2 uptake, methods
of deliberate ocean carbon sequestration, and ocean environmental genomics. The
United States Geological Survey (USGS) co-sponsored a recent major ocean
acidification workshop and report (Kleypas et al., 2006, has expertise on ocean
carbonate systems and coastal ecosystems, and is supporting currently a limited
research effort on acidification effects on coral reefs. Other federal science
agencies with potential interest and expertise relevant to the acidification
problem and its biological repercussions include the National Park Service, US
Fish and Wildlife and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Present Interagency Effort

Despite some
prominent successes, the present national
investment in ocean acidification research is inadequate to address the
research challenges described above and is not creating the required
comprehensive research program integrating the chemical, biological and human
dimension aspects of the acidification problem. There are issues involving the
direction and funding level for both basic science, which provides information
on the extent of ocean acidification, and applied science, which addresses
adaptation strategies and solutions. Research and training go hand in hand, and
more resources need to be devoted to undergraduate and graduate student
training to ensure and strong scientific base for the future. Further, basic
science efforts within the U.S. are often poorly connected with stakeholders
and more applied research targeting coral reef and fisheries management and
conservation. As a result, the U.S. research community is falling behind our
European and Japanese colleagues, who are already moving forward on coordinated
ocean acidification initiatives.

The current funding level for ocean
acidification research does not support the deployment of sufficient ocean
monitoring capabilities, particularly in coastal waters where economically
important ecosystems are at risk. New findings just released last week in
Science magazine (Feely et al., 2008) of corrosive, acidified ocean waters on
the continental shelf along the US west coast indicate that acidification is a
problem we face now, not decades in the future. But these results from the
first systematic survey of seawater CO2 and acidification in North
American coastal waters also highlight the difficulties in monitoring ocean
chemistry from slow moving and expensive ships. New robust chemical sensor
technologies exist or are being developed, and an ocean acidification observing
system needs to be deployed combining instrumented autonomous platforms
(moorings, gliders, floats) supported by shipboard surveys and process studies.

The NSF supported ocean carbon time-series
stations at Hawaii and Bermuda are pivotal to the US and international research
community, the ocean equivalent of the iconic Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2
record. But such long records over time, critical for identifying trends due
anthropogenic CO2 and acidification, are the exception not the rule.
With our present funding mechanisms, it is difficult to maintain and support
long-term, sustained time-series. Each 3-5 year funding cycle, the principal
investigators need to create a new scientific justification for making
continued measurements when in fact the unique value of time-series is their
continuity over time, the value growing dramatically as the records extend over
multiple decades (and funding cycles). The research community continues to
struggle with simply maintaining current capabilities, and few new time-series
are being established in different ocean environments.

In a similar
vein, satellite measurements provide an unprecedented
view of the temporal variations in ocean ecology. The ocean is vast, and
the limited number of research ships move at about the speed of a bicycle, too
slow to map the ocean routinely on ocean basin to global scales. By contrast, a
satellite can observe the entire globe, at least the cloud free areas, in a few
days. The detection of gradual trends such as those
due to ocean acidification is challenging. Currently remote sensing can be used
to estimate a number of biological and chemical properties of the ocean (e.g.,
particulate calcite, pCO2) relevant to understanding the impacts of an
acidifying ocean on ocean ecology and chemistry. Finding trends in these
records requires long, coherent and internally consistent, high-quality global
time series. Potential gaps in data coverage between satellite missions are
particular worrisome; each sensor has its own unique calibration issues, and
without overlap of missions in orbit, it is often impossible to construct a
climate quality time record the extends over multiple missions. At present, the
on-going availability of high-quality, climate data records is not assured
during the transition of many satellite ocean measurements from NASA research
to the NOAA/DOD operational NPOESS program. For example, the present NASA
satellite ocean color sensors, needed to determine ocean plankto, are nearing
the end of their service life, and the replacement sensors on NPOESS may not be
adequate for the climate community. Further, refocusing of NASA priorities away
from earth science may dramatically limit or full preclude new ocean satellite
missions need to characterize ocean biological dynamics.

US ocean acidification research is also limited, at
present, by the size and scope of potential field research projects. In
particular, the current funding environment does not encourage the next generation of mesocosm (large enclosed
tanks or floating bags of water) and ecosystem-scale field experiments where
scientists manipulate environmental conditions (e.g., CO2, pH) and
then examine how ocean biology changes. Many of the major unresolved questions
concerning ocean acidification involve impacts on scales too large to test in
the laboratory and on communities of organisms and species. The infrastructure
and logistics for manipulative experiments is costly, but the scientific payoff
can be substantial, and for some problems manipulation of the ecosystem
provides new scientific insights that are not easily attained in other ways.
Deliberate ocean iron release experiments are one such example. European
scientists have made considerable headway on ocean acidification using a
dedicated mesocosm facility for water-column plankton studies, and design
studies are underway for manipulative coral reef acidification experiments,
similar in concept to terrestrial Free Air Carbon Experiment (FACE) system used
to study CO2 fertilization effects on terrestrial grasses, shrubs
and trees. The University of Washington is moving forward, with state and
private foundation support, on plans for an ocean mesocosm system, which could
be expanded into a facility broadly available to the US research community.

There are also a number of issues with the
coordination and management across science agencies. Interagency coordination
on US ocean acidification research occurs via several related pathways
involving both program managers from the federal science agencies and federal and
university scientists. The US Carbon Cycle Science Program (CCSP) is an
interagency partnership (http://www.carboncyclescience.gov/) focused broadly on the global carbon cycle
in the ocean, on land, and in the atmosphere and the interactions with climate.
The CCSP is part of the US Climate Change Science Program, and it has an
Interagency Working Group (agency representatives from NOAA, NASA, NSF, DOC,
USGS and a number of other, more terrestrially oriented agencies) and a
Scientific Steering Group. The Carbon Cycle Science Program initiated an ocean
research program, the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change (OCCC) Program, focused
on monitoring the ocean carbon system and predicting its future behavior.

A key issue with regards to ocean
acidification is that the Carbon Cycle Science Program covers only a portion of
the ocean acidification problem, namely the controls on the oceanic uptake of
CO2, resulting changes in seawater chemistry and ocean mechanisms
that could damp or accelerate climate change by altering atmospheric CO2
levels. Key aspects of the acidification problem on ecological and
socio-economic impacts extend well beyond the purview of the Carbon Cycle
Science Program, however. While there are elements of the US Climate Change
Science Program that could address ecological research and coordination needs
on ocean acidification, the interactions have been minimal and disjoint to date
reflecting the conflicting demands of a program covering such a wide research
domain and not focused specifically on the ocean.

There is also an existing, informal
interagency effort on ocean biogeochemistry and ocean acidification, the Ocean
Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program (http://us-ocb.org/), which is
supported by federal program managers at the NSF, NASA, and NOAA and assisted
by input from a scientific steering committee consisting of academic and
government scientists. The OCB Program encompasses the scientific direction of
the OCCC program and also expands into ocean ecology to the degree that it
interactions with biogeochemical cycling. The OCB and OCCC scientific steering
groups overlap in membership and meet jointly. The OCB has taken the lead on
organizing a recent major US ocean acidification workshop last Fall in La Jolla
CA (Kleypas et al., 2008b), and is also working to ensure the appropriate
international linkages with emerging and existing ocean acidification programs
supported by the European Union, Australia and Japan. The informal interactions
facilitated by OCB are working well but do not cover the full scope of
acidification research, for example the more fisheries and coral reef oriented
work currently supported internally within NOAA or socioeconomic components of
the problem.

Recommendations on the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act

The Federal Ocean Acidification
Research and Monitoring Act, H.R. 4174, is an important step toward a
comprehensive U.S. ocean research program. The proposed funding level ramping
to $30 million in FY2012 will greatly enhance U.S. research capabilities. But
even this level may fall short of true needs, which are estimated at closer to
$50-55 million a year based on recent scientific community-wide planning
efforts. To put this in context, one can compare against the funding levels of
prior major oceanographic research programs. The US JGOFS and US GLOBEC
programs in the 1990s involved large-scale field research on ocean
biogeochemistry and ecology, similar to what is envisioned in a new ocean
acidification program. In the late 1990s the NSF component of those two
programs totaled about $24 million a year. Adding the contributions from NOAA,
NASA and DOE approximately doubled the total funding to about $40-45 million
per year in late 1990s dollars unadjusted for inflation and the rising ship operation
costs. This cost estimate does not consider that a comprehensive acidification
program will include additional research components on coral reef, fisheries,
and human dimensions.

The total authorization for FORAM (H.R 4174) should
be increased to $50-55 million per year, a reasonable minimum to conduct
the required basic and applied research and deliver those results in a
timely fashion to stakeholders, resource managers and policymakers.

The US scientific community is well poised to
take advantage of increased funding on ocean acidification. As demonstrated by
the consensus recommendations from two recent major US ocean acidification
science workshops (Kleypas et al., 2006; Fabry et al., 2008b), a roadmap for a
coherent acidification program is in place and the community could move quickly
toward implementing these research plans as increased funding becomes
available. Forward progress on an expanded US ocean acidification research
program should not be delayed waiting for the completion of the proposed
National Academy of Sciences study on ocean acidification research priorities.

The ramp-up
in research funding in H.R. 4174 should be accelerated in order to more
quickly get needed information into the hands of stakeholders and decision
makers.

Other recommendations on funding
approaches for ocean acidification include:

Funds should be directly authorized to the major
ocean science agencies (NSF and NASA), rather than distributed to NOAA;
this would streamline planning, speed research progress, and take better
advantage of the unique capabilities of the other agencies.

A
substantial portion of the authorized funding should be not just
competitive but also extramural, to harness the tremendous capacity of our
university academic research community – considering the scope of this
problem, we need to bring all available resources to bear on developing
the science quickly and efficiently.

The structure of the ocean acidification
research program should remain adaptive and encourage exploration of a broad
range of scientific areas.Ocean
acidification is a new area of research, and many surprises remain ahead. This
is illustrated by dramatic findings announced just in the last few weeks on
accelerated acidification along the US west coast (Feely et al., 2008) and
increased calcification by some phytoplankton under high CO2,
counter to our expectations about an increasing corrosive ocean
(Iglesias-Rodriguez et al., 2008). Ocean acidification research is at present
multi-faceted and fast-moving, and marine plants and animals and ocean
biogeochemical cycle are affected by more than simply reduced seawater pH. There is much that we do not understand as yet
about ocean acidification and the multiple pathways by which acidification and
rising CO2 will alter the marine environment.

The current definition of “ocean acidification” in
the bill should be expanded from simply reduced pH to incorporate the full
suite of changes in ocean chemistry arising from increased carbon dioxide.

The scope of
the ocean acidification research program should leave wide latitude for
the types of exploratory and discovery-based science investigations
generally supported by the NSF, NASA and the extramural components of NOAA
(e.g., NOAA Climate Program Office).

Strong interagency cooperation and
coordination is critical to leverage the diverse expertise and research
infrastructure of the individual federal science agencies, which tie into
different parts of the US ocean science community. But this may be best
accomplished through successful existing structures rather than by creating a
new interagency committee. These include the National Ocean Partnership Program
(NOPP; http://www.nopp.org) and the NSTC Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology
(JSOST; http://ocean.ceq.gov/about/jsost.html). There is also considerable merit to more
informal interagency partnerships, such as those that supported the US Joint
Global Ocean Flux Study and that are now supporting the US Ocean Carbon and
Biogeochemistry Program. A strong and on-going dialog needs to be maintained
between federal agency program managers and the scientific community,
consisting of both federal and university researchers, on the planning,
implementation and synthesis of ocean acidification research. This can be
accomplished through a variety of mechanisms including scientific steering
groups and community workshops. Finally, ocean acidification is a global
problem, and the US and international research communities should work closely
to increase the pace of discovery and the development of adaptation strategies.

The bill should support a strong, interagency consultative process on
the science of ocean acidification with substantial and ongoing input from the
scientific community.

The US
ocean acidification program should establish strong ties with similar
international research programs and develop mechanisms for US researchers to
participate freely in international research activities.